She considers “the women who have been forced into the cheating, damning struggle for life,” and urges that “the life-blood of women, that should be given to the race, is being stitched into our ready-made clothes; washed and ironed into our linen; poured into our adulterated foods”; and so on. But her reasoning in this chapter is not very clear. Women, to avoid parasitism, must work, and only a relatively small proportion of them can now find in their homes work enough to keep them self-sustaining. Protest against the sweating of women is not only philanthropic—it is perfectly sound political economy. Women workers not only should be protected against long hours, unnecessary risks, insanitary surroundings, merciless nerve tension, and the computation of their wages on a basis of their assured ability to live partly by their labor and partly by the legitimatized or unlegitimatized sale of their sex; but this can, and must, be done. Yet, when all this has been accomplished, will Mrs. Gallichan feel satisfied that the struggle for life is not “cheating, damning,” if owing to conditions we cannot regulate that struggle fails also to comprehend the struggle to give life, to reproduce?
It is because we are the mothers of men that we claim to be free.
This is the keynote of her book. But she is by no means clear in her mind as to how the mothers of men are to maintain themselves in a freedom which shall be real, not merely conceded; nor as to how the millions of women who, under our monogamous societies, cannot be permanently mated, are to justify their struggle for existence by becoming “mothers of men.”
The something that Mrs. Gallichan lacks, not in her retrospect so much as in her previsioning, has been lacked by many of the great investigators and writers who have built up the magnificent literature of evolution and evolutionary philosophy: she has an admirable survey of the “whenceness” of life and love and labor, but a short-sighted, astigmatic vision of its “whereuntoness.”
If the sole purpose of life and love and labor, among humans as among lower animals, is to continue life, to transmit the life-force, then indeed are those frustrated, futile creatures who are cheated, or who cheat themselves, out of rendering this one service to the world which can justify them for having lived in it.
But if, as most of us believe, we are more than just links in the human chain; if we have a relation to eternity as well as to history and to posterity, there are splendid interpretations of our struggles that Mrs. Gallichan does not apprehend. If souls are immortal, life is more than the perpetuation of species, or even than the improvement of the race; it is the place allotted to us for the development of that imperishable part which we are to carry hence, and through eternity. And any effort of ours which helps other souls to realize the best that life can give, to seek the best that immortality can perpetuate, may splendidly justify our existence.
Mrs. Gallichan’s conclusion about religion is that it is an “opium” to which women resort when they have no proper outlet for their sex-impulses. “I am certain,” she says, “that in us the religious impulse and the sex impulse are one.” And when she was able to satisfy the sex impulse, she no longer had any need of or interest in religion.
The limitations this puts upon her interpretation of life are too obvious to need cataloging. And this is the reason she signally fails to tell the whole of the truth about woman. This is the reason why the latter chapters of her book, in which she writes of marriage and divorce and prostitution, are of less worth to the generality of readers than the earlier ones; though this is not to say that these chapters do not contain a very great deal of vigorous thinking and excellent suggestion. But to anyone who holds that the continuance of life is the principal justification for having lived, yet deplores free love and state endowment of mothers, there is inevitably an appalling waste, for the elimination of which she may well be staggered to suggest a remedy.
Mrs. Gallichan’s book is not constructive in effect. But it is so excellently analytical, as far as it goes, that it can scarcely fail to provoke a great deal of thought.